Borders in Dispute Pagina's.Indd

Cover Page The handle http://hdl.handle.net/1887/36505 holds various files of this Leiden University dissertation Author: Boonen, Cris Anne Title: Borders in dispute : the construction of state and nation in international diplomacy Issue Date: 2015-12-02 Chapter 5 A Sociological Analysis of Practices in Boundary Politics: Professionals of Politics and Territoriality in the Yugoslav Federation How do diplomatic actors manage the implications of sovereignty changes for international borders in the context of specifc negotiations? Te crisis in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1991 was a moment open to defne practices in boundary politics. Te uti possidetis principle prevailed; the state dissolved with its successor states maintaining the republican boundaries. But the territory of one of these successor states, the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, was de facto divided between ethnic communities only fve years later. Tis means that while boundaries were ofcially drawn in conformity with the uti possidetis principle, their efects contradict this prevailing practice. In order to understand this apparent anomaly, it is necessary to analyse the agents and the social processes through which they established these territorial arrangements in the negotiation process. It then appears that diferent groups of negotiators had diferent conceptions of peace and order. Tey identifed diferent security threat(s) related to territories and populations for which they found alternative solutions. A particular set of professionals of politics supporting a doxa against the creation of nation-states gained authority frst to defne outcomes in the Yugoslav crisis without territorial changes. Yet military representatives infuenced the practice of boundary politics after nationalist violence broke out challenging this territorial arrangement in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was through the military justifcation of defensibility that the nationalist vision ultimately became acceptable as the ‘feasible’ or ‘realistic’ outcome. In this chapter, I analyse how the possibilities to manage sovereignty change upon the emergence of the Yugoslav crisis were narrowed down 117 to one territorial arrangement in line with the uti possidetis principle. I argue that boundary maintenance was the outcome of an international negotiation process structured on the idea that creating nation-states by means of territorial adjustment was undesirable for international peace and order. Tis doxa prevailed among professionals of politics in the European Community as a response to the violence in the Yugoslav federation in July 1991. Te hostilities foregrounded the association of boundary change with irredentism and a disruption of international order rather than dispute settlement. Particularly representatives facing aggressive nationalism in their home states then sided with Ministers of Foreign Afairs Gianni de Michelis and Hans-Dietrich Genscher in their early calls for boundary maintenance. De Michelis and Genscher had shown particular proponents of European integration in negotiations for the 1992 Maastricht Treaty. In line with this prioritisation of territory over population, they unequivocally rejected accommodating nations in the break-up of Yugoslavia. Te belief that creating nation-states was ‘out of date’ and would open a ‘Pandora’s box’ of territorial changes elsewhere then convinced their colleagues to abandon the idea of boundary redrawing in Yugoslavia after violence had broken out. Tis response to violence in Yugoslavia defnitively oriented the development of the territorial arrangement in the direction of boundary maintenance when the EC Ministers of Foreign Afairs established the EC Conference on Yugoslavia. Under the lead of German Minister of Foreign Afairs Hans-Dietrich Genscher, they mobilised a delegation of (former) politicians and civil servants to formulate a territorial arrangement, while they engaged a commission of lawyers trained in constitutional law at the initiative of French Minister of Foreign Afairs Roland Dumas (pressured by his President’s former Minister of Justice and President of the Constitutional Council Robert Badinter). Te procedures of selection by the EC Ministers of Foreign Afairs remain unclear. Participants prove unwilling to discuss the matter openly while minutes of deliberations are absent or classifed. Yet it is clear in line with the principal-agent approach that these actors were all likely and sometimes demonstrated supporters of statehood defned by political unity, so detached from nationalist sentiments of territorial adjustment, in accordance with what the ministers had coordinated on. Tey then structured the negotiation process towards independence of the territorial units in the Yugoslav federation. Tey set boundary maintenance as a (legal) condition for negotiation and strictly controlled who spoke when and with whom to leave the option of 118 territorial adjustments of the table. Tis gave the EC Ministers of Foreign Afairs the opportunity in December 1991 to materialise maintenance of the republican boundaries despite continued objections raised by President Milošević of the republic of Serbia. Tese fndings are at odds with existing explanations. Realists in International Relations theory like Krasner (1999) and Coggins (2011) theorise accurately that boundary maintenance originates with powerful actors in international diplomacy, yet the international negotiations concerning Yugoslavia’s dissolution show that they might be misguided on the underlying mechanism. A detailed analysis of the international negotiation process demonstrates that integrationist EC Ministers of Foreign Afairs did not change behaviours by means of tacit or explicit coercion; attitudinal changes were based in beliefs or doxa on to the creation of nation-states. Professionals of politics generally shared association that irredentism needed to be curtailed for international peace and order, so once violence broke out in Yugoslavia, they agreed to respond by maintaining boundaries. Tis security map remained largely unquestioned among the professionals of politics in Europe; it was not based on pure rational choice and refrained them from settling with the Serbs, who constituted the second-largest ethnic community in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in the territorial arrangement. Te politicians believed in boundary stability as a remedy for state break-ups in nation-states. Analysis of the negotiation process furthermore reveals that there was not initially the broad agreement on outcomes expected in norm- driven accounts of the practice of boundary politics. Many mainstream constructivist and English School theorists such as Fabry (2010) argue that norms of international legitimacy settled in the 1960s and early 1970s and extended into the post-Cold War era to guide behaviour. Hence “international diplomacy never seriously explored [change of borders] in any contentious cases prior to recognition of the new states,” Fabry (2010: 205) writes. But boundary maintenance was in fact not the expected outcome from the start in diplomacy on the Yugoslav federation. Until violence escalated in mid-July 1991, a snapshot of the process included negotiations that could well have led to a reconsideration of republican boundaries in contrast with a norm on territorial stability. It was in fact only when the association with nationalism spread that adherence to the uti possidetis principle became the only possible outcome for European professionals of politics. 119 And boundary maintenance did not serve as a simple rule or ‘focal point’ or lowest common denominator for negotiators, as neoliberal institutionalists like Zacher (2001) and Carter and Goemans (2011) argue. “[U]ncertainty is minimised for both local actors and leaders when borders they have previously coordinated on become the new international borders,” Carter and Goemans (2011: 284) claim. Whether this is true or not, at close look at the international negotiation process reveals that the political leaders of the Yugoslav republics at no point all considered it true. Te uti possidetis principle did hence not minimise uncertainty, nor did it reduce the transaction costs in the negotiation process. With the (former) politicians and civil servants and the commission of lawyers in the EC Conference on Yugoslavia, the EC Ministers of Foreign Afairs in fact invested signifcantly to set boundary stability as a precondition for negotiation between the Yugoslavs exactly because the president of the later Republic of Serbia did not subscribe to the principle. My account fundamentally distinguishes from these existing explanations in its emphasis on actors in addition to context in order to develop how practices were constructed in boundary politics. A focus on context leads theorists in International Relations literature to consider as objective the efects of confict in the international territorial order or the system of international norms on practices. Yet I fnd that these efects are interpreted in practice by negotiators on the basis of their socialisation in networks and practices. People with diferent social backgrounds tend to defne diferent threats to peace and order and hence take diferent stances on territorial arrangements. Tis stance-taking can only be understood if one reconstructs the negotiators’ past experiences that are actualised in the context of particular negotiations. To then understand how particular stances shape practices, we need to consider their interactions in context,

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